Cane furniture, bent and woven in Woodstock

Cane bends, and then it stays bent

The workroom is one long room off Albert Road with a steam box down the far end, and the steam box is really the whole business. Rattan arrives as stiff poles from an importer in Durban who brings it in from Kalimantan. Left alone a pole will not go round anything tighter than a hand’s width without splitting down its length. Twenty minutes in the steam and the same pole bends round a former like wet rope — and then it has to be clamped and left, because cane holds whatever shape it cools in and nothing you do afterwards will talk it out of that. A chair frame is two days of steaming, bending and pinning, and then three to five days of weaving over it depending on how tight the pattern runs. We do not sand a frame smooth and spray it: the colour on everything here is the cane’s own, sealed matte so it can still take a wet glass. Six of us work in the room. Ashwin has been binding joints since 1998 and is faster by hand than anyone we have ever managed to train on a machine.